I want to move some of my Live photos from Photo app to the File app in iPhone or my iCloud Drive by "Save to File", but my Live photos are converted to JPEG ! no longer be a Live photo.
How to keep the Live feature?
iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 26
That’s right. Live Photos is an Apple Photos thing—it’s not a standard aspect in pictures' metadata. So if you remove a Live Photo from Photos, then it can’t be Live. If you use iCloud Photos, then Live Photos are automatically synchronized within the Photos system, so their Liveness survives a transfer to another device's Photos app. When you remove Live Photos from the Photos environment, the best thing that can be done is to make a movie with the accompanying jpg. If this move/jpg combination is jointly imported to Photos, then the app can make a Live Photo from it.
Matti Haveri wrote:
You have to import them to Mac Photos or (AFAIK -- I don't use iCloud Photos) via iCloud Photos for that to happen -- via Files.app NOT.
hanks Matti, got it.
Just tried import them to Mac Photos and works.
well, dont know why it's not implemented in iPhone Files.app
Live Photos are .jpg or .heic and .mov pairs which Photos.app glues together if certain metadata matches (*). Outside Photos or when routed through Files.app they are separated unless they are re-encoded as movie-only.
(*) The key metadata item in Live photos is ContentIdentifier. It has to be identical in both the image and the movie. Even the file names do not have to match. When importing such pair, Photos.app shows only the imported image's filename. Also the matching movie can be from a completely different footage such as .mp4.
2024-0305-1201-37_01.jpg
[Apple] ContentIdentifier : A3E5437B-626A-42FE-9B6E-1791337877BF
2024-0305-1201-37_01.mov
[Keys] ContentIdentifier : A3E5437B-626A-42FE-9B6E-1791337877BF
On the other hand Android "Motion Photos" has the movie embedded inside .jpg and can be extracted with exiftool. Last time I fiddled with this I could extract .mp4 from .jpg in Android Motion Photos with something like:
exiftool -b -p '${trailer;s/.*(\0\0\0\x1cftypisom)/$1/s}' -ext jpg -w mp4 .
...I then had to use ffmpeg to convert output so that QuickLook could display it.
...IMHO those Live Photos and Motion Photos is a gimmick so I shoot all my images without it.
Matti Haveri wrote: … via Files.app NOT.
That's seems to be right. I tried it on my iPad, and it didn't work. However, iCloud is not needed. I just imported (dragged to the Photos icon) a picture/movie pair, and I got a Live Photo in Photos.
It's a little hard to test in iCloud, since the pair I'm playing already exists there. Oh, that's right-- you can't import movies through iCloud.com.
I googled it too — tons of posts say Photos will rebuild the Live Photo if the metadata matches, but it’s just not happening.
I exported some Live Photos with 'Export Unmodified Original.' Each got split into a .JPEG + .MOV pair. I assumed they’d share the same Content Identifier, right?
When I moved both files back from Files into Photos, they stayed separate and didn’t recombine into Live Photos.
ChesterCWC wrote:
I exported some Live Photos with 'Export Unmodified Original.' Each got split into a .JPEG + .MOV pair. I assumed they’d share the same Content Identifier, right?
Yes.
When I moved both files back from Files into Photos, they stayed separate and didn’t recombine into Live Photos.
You have to import them to Mac Photos or (AFAIK -- I don't use iCloud Photos) via iCloud Photos for that to happen -- via Files.app NOT.
Richard.Taylor wrote:
It's a little hard to test in iCloud, since the pair I'm playing already exists there. Oh, that's right-- you can't import movies through iCloud.com.
no option to import the picture/movie pair from iCloud Drive to iCloud Photo through iCloud.com.
Do you have a Mac as well?
On a Mac you can export Live Photos (or Live Photos with a Live effects applied) as an animated gif. Then you just have one file to care about when saving them.
On the iPhone you would need to find a suitable app to do that.
I am using the Live Photos primarily in my photo books I am creating with Pages. Adding a Live Photo to Pages will convert it automatically to a video clip or a GIF, depending on the version of Pages.
Keep Live Photo when moving to iCloud Drive or File app on my phone
